Internet speeds have increased 1500% in ten years. 250k Wi-Fi hotspots are now available. That's progress.

When I read this, I just thought, this is such bullshit. Taking it apart with sufficiently satisfying thoroughness requires more than 140 characters, so I'm going to say it here.

US ISPs are riding the wave of technological progress. Giving them credit for the wave is evidence of cluelessness so extreme as to strongly suggest intellectual dishonesty.

First, crediting ISPs for the spread of wireless hotspots is especially egregious: it's a bit like giving them credit for Moore's Law. Even if ISPs had completely failed to increase speeds beyond dial-up, people would still want local networks without the hassle of Ethernet cables. The development and spread of wireless technology was not driven by ISPs. In fact, in some ways the opposite is true, as many ISPs retained official policies against running an open wireless hotspot (or even connecting multiple devices via NAT!) long after broadband became widely available.

Second, as for a 15x improvement in ten years[0]: that might sound impressive to some people, but all I can think is that ten years equals nearly seven doublings of Moore's Law and 27 = 128. Network speed doesn't track transistor density exactly, but computing technology is full of exponential curves like this (storage density, for example, doubles even faster than Moore's Law). To anyone with a clue about computing technology, 15x in 10 years obviously sounds somewhere between mediocre and lousy. In fact, Nielsen's Law predicts compound improvement of 57x over 10 years, or nearly 4x the observed improvement claimed by Dietz.[1] When Dietz calls out 15x improvement as a talking point in ISPs' favor, he is trying to rhetorically exploit an information asymmetry, namely his audience's presumed ignorance of exponential curves in computing technology.

Therefore, the reality is that US ISPs are badly managed technological laggards, just like everyone thinks.

In fact, the pace at which ISPs have taken up technological innovation is so bad that an entrant from another industry was able to enter the market and, without even trying very hard, spank the incumbents so thoroughly that it became a national embarrassment.

Google does so many things so well that you may not even be properly surprised by this fact. Let me try to give you a visceral feel for how anomalous Google Fiber is. Consider what happened when Google entered a market where its major competitor really was pushing innovation to the limit: consider Android. Google had to dedicate hundreds of its best and hardest-working engineers to the project and enlist the support of essentially every other company in the industry, and after eight hard-fought years, the best it can show for its efforts is rough technological parity with Apple.

Or, to take an example where Google was the defender, consider what happened when Microsoft decided to enter the search engine market. Again, this is a market where the strongest competitor really was pushing innovation to the limit. Billions of dollars and millions of engineer-hours later, Bing's search quality is still slightly worse than Google's.

I don't know the head count for Google Fiber (and even if I did, it would be covered by my NDA) but I will venture a strong guess that its engineering head count is far less than Android's, like at least an order of magnitude. In Google's product portfolio, judging by the scale of investment and strategic value, Google Fiber is basically a hobby, one that Google would never even have tried if US ISPs were remotely as good at their jobs as, say, ISPs in South Korea. And yet, technologically, Google Fiber simply outclassed these incumbents, who are supposedly competing and innovating furiously to earn your dollar.[2]

Imagine you had a friend who claimed to be training super-hard at tennis. But whenever you're at the courts, you see them go out to the court, set up the tennis ball machine, and swat lethargically at balls for about ten minutes, after which they sit down to sip an energy drink and diddle around on their phone. Then, one day, your niece, who's in reasonably good shape but has never picked up a tennis racket in her life, drops by, and she walks onto the court and crushes your friend in straight sets without breaking a sweat. You might reasonably question whether your friend was really training as hard as they claim.

In short, lauding the big US ISPs for their piddling achievements is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

But don't worry, ISPs, America isn't giving up on you. We believe that if you're subjected to the right mixture of tough love, including the right kinds of competition and regulation, you're capable of achieving just as much as Google Fiber did. Or, at a minimum, we believe that the ISP market is capable of achieving that. In the meantime, we'll try hard to ignore the risible bullshit of telecom hacks who claim that you're doing well enough.

[0] Engineers generally use multiples rather than percentages to describe improvements of this magnitude. Dietz's use of "increased 1500%" rather than 15x is a classic PR hack's way of making modestly sized numbers seem gigantic.

[1] Nielsen's predictions are fitted to observations, but those observations are for "high-end users". Dietz's number, which presumably describes mean or median users, reveals how poorly ISPs have done at making high-speed internet affordable despite the march of technology. Note that we do not see this failure in other, more competitive areas of computing technology: Intel's mid-range notebook-class processors follow Moore's Law just as well as its high-end server chips.

[2] This paragraph contains a logical honeypot for telecom hacks, who are likely to see an argument that they think they can debunk, but which they can only debunk by resorting to utter bullshit, which they will promptly be called upon. See if you can spot it.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

With polls opening tomorrow for Scottish independence, I feel like sharing a little story. Last fall, A. and I were in Scotland and England for a couple of weeks*. In Scotland, there was more or less incessant discussion of independence: it was discussed constantly on BBC Scotland; there were leaflets, posters, and newspaper headlines; one cab driver gave us a long disquisition, during a short ride to the train station, on the evils of Blair's capitulation in Iraq and how an independent Scotland was nae goan tae be dragged intae wars over Israel and oil any longer by the U.S.

Now, if you travel through Scotland and then England as a tourist, there is a good chance that you will pull some money out of an ATM in Scotland and want to spend it in England. And although the UK shares a single currency, bills printed in Scotland look different from bills printed in England, and the Scottish variants are rare enough in England that paying with a Scottish £10 note in London elicits a moment of surprise. (Apparently it is not even technically legal tender in England, although everyone accepts it anyway.)

So, I was buying a sandwich at a Pret a Manger in London, and as the cashier was eyeballing both sides of the note, I remarked, "Got it in Scotland. Still a part of the UK, for now."

"Really? It's all they can talk about up there. It's on the radio all the time..."

"Nah, it's not going to happen."

Her tone was casually amused, not so much Scotland shouldn't secede, that would be terrible and more Ha ha, this Yank, thinks that silliness up north is going to amount to something.

Her accent was English, of course; being American, I don't have the ear to pare it down more finely than that, but she was dark-skinned, of African or South Asian descent, and she sounded to me like any other working class London girl. I would venture to guess that this wasn't really your classic upper-class English snobbery about Northerners at work, at least not directly. I think, rather, that the English and Scottish, despite sharing a government, a currency, a language, and a relatively small island, amply interconnected by transit, media, and commerce, had developed completely different collective understandings of the state of the Scottish independence movement. There were, for example, no front-page headlines in London papers (that I can recall) about Scottish independence.

As it turns out, the Scots were right. Even if the current referendum fails, independence has clearly become a real possibility. And it's interesting to me how unseriously the English seemed to take the whole thing, even as late as last fall. Why didn't they see that how real this was? Did most English have no Scottish friends, did they not travel to Scotland? Or maybe the thought of the UK breaking apart was just too massive an event to ponder, sort of like how San Franciscans live in a state of day-to-day collective denial about The Big One?

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

I realized today, when I read the phrasing of this LtU post, that my lasttwo posts were too pessimistic about functional programming languages. There is, of course, at least one very popular functional programming language, and that is Emacs Lisp. Emacs Lisp is even widely used, at least a little bit, by countless programmers who never use any other functional programming languages at all. But this just confirms my original hypothesis that language popularity is driven almost entirely by platform, not by characteristics of the language itself.

Monday, September 08, 2014

A given prior language only occasionally correlated with the choice of a specific different language for the next project. Most notably, developers have high propensities to switch between Windows scripting and application languages, such as VBScript and C#. These languages also correlate with Microsoft web-development languages such as ASP. Such correlations are also visible in the results of Karus and Gall [12], who found groupings such as WSDL and XML being used in conjunction with Java.

Notably, we do not see significant exploration within linguistic families. There is a relatively low probability of switching between Scheme and LISP, or between Ruby, Python, and Perl. We conclude that developer movement between languages is driven more by external factors such as the developer’s background or technical ecosystem than by similarity of the underlying languages. This implies that language advocates should focus on a domain and try to convince programmers in that domain, instead of trying to convince programmers who use languages with semantic similarities to the new language.

Note that this clearly weighs against the Chaudhuri/Hicks hypothesis that education or unfamiliarity with functional programming is the "real problem". If developers tended to choose languages based primarily on comfort and familiarity, then we would expect them to switch more frequently among languages within a family than across families. Instead we observe the converse pattern: developers switch quite freely between programming language families whenever they need to do so in order to get work done in their domain.

In fact I think Meyerovich and Rabkin are too tentative in their formulation (maybe appropriate in an academic paper, but here we don't need to be so tentative). I think it is quite unlikely that developer background is a major deterrent to new language adoption. To repeat something I said the other day, developers routinely learn all kinds of weird, complicated, and frequently frustrating technologies in the course of their work. New programming languages are not fundamentally harder than all these other technologies, and programmers will learn them when they need to in order to get work done. The problem most unpopular programming languages face is simply that nobody needs them to get work done.

Overall, people who wish to change the mix of programming languages currently in use should spend less time extolling the virtues of their language (and criticizing competing languages!), and much, much more time developing platforms and libraries to make their language of choice a stellar tool in some concrete domain.

Tuesday, September 02, 2014

Rice University's Swarat Chaudhuri asks (and attempts to answer) the perennial question: why isn't functional programming more popular? I have my own long-running theory about why programming languages become popular (or don't), but first let me dispute a couple of specific things in the linked post. Chaudhuri writes:

The same survey also showed that the factor that correlates the most with preferring and using a language is the availability of libraries. This is certainly behind the meteoric rise of, say, Python. However, it seems implausible that this factor is the primary reason why functional programming is unpopular. If it were so, the F# language, which allows functional programmers to utilize the entire .NET infrastructure, would be a mainstream language by now. There’s no indication it will be any time soon.

I think Chaudhuri dismisses the hypothesis far too lightly. Here are three obvious reasons why F# is not a counterexample:

I have never programmed in F# (although I've done a little OCaml, and I gather they're almost identical), but my long experience with cross-language interoperability makes me suspect strongly that accessing nontrivial C# libraries from F# is nothing like using libraries written idiomatically in F#. It probably feels much more like calling through a foreign function interface — for example, like accessing Java classes from Jython, except possibly worse, because C# is not only a different language but a different programming paradigm.

There are a large variety of inevitable network effects that come from using a single language within a project. If you are going to use mostly C# libraries in the .NET ecosystem, then a sensible project manager is probably going to choose to implement the project itself in C# rather than F#. This is especially true if libraries would force you to write a lot of your code in a semi-OO style within F# anyway.

The .NET ecosystem has never had great mindshare in the communities where most of the "hot" industrial software development is happening: open source, backend software running in the datacenter, web development, and mobile development. Spend a little time walking around Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and see how many hackers are using Windows. If, somewhere in the sea of Macbooks, you even glimpse someone using a Thinkpad, there's an excellent chance that it's running Ubuntu. Conversely, if you see someone using Windows, there's an excellent chance they're a business suit from a large corporation (at startups, even the businesspeople use Macbooks).

In fact, this was almost as true, last I checked (years ago, admittedly), even within the programming language research community. It is startling to me that a programming language researcher would look around, observe almost nobody they know hacking on Windows, and still ask why F# on .NET has not taken off.

(Mono notwithstanding, my understanding is that Microsoft has never made it a priority to make .NET development a really great experience on non-Windows platforms. C# may have a lot of libraries, but Mono has always been a second-class citizen and there is an excellent chance that large swaths of the C# ecosystem depend on APIs (or, worse, subtle implementation quirks) specific to Microsoft .NET. I suspect any prudent project manager looking at the .NET ecosystem is unlikely to bet the farm on Mono.)

Next, Chaudhuri goes on to argue that the lack of university education in functional programming is to blame. Well, I won't deny that this is a contributing factor, but: few CS schools these days teach Ruby or Perl or Objective-C, yet those languages seem reasonably popular; few CS programs teach more than rudimentary use of version control, but git (i.e. the most complex version control system known to humankind) seems popular; few CS programs teach web frontend development frameworks or MVC or template metaprogramming or MapReduce (at least, not until recently, and certainly not in intro level classes), yet all those things and many more have managed to achieve significant adoption in industry.

In short, professional developers routinely adopt all sorts of complex technologies that are not taught academically. As cool as functional programming is, I just don't believe it's fundamentally that much weirder or harder than all the things modern developers use every day. If I had told you a decade ago that in 2014, a nontrivial number of professional programmers would be writing server applications and developer tools in hand-rolled continuation-passing style, you would have looked at me funny; yet here we are!

So, then, how do I explain the relative unpopularity of functional programming languages?

First, I would observe that most programming languages are not popular, period. People have invented tens of thousands of programming languages, and nearly all of them languish in obscurity. Only a very select few manage to achieve popularity. Given that functional programming languages are a minority of all languages, we should naively expect a minority of popular languages to be functional, just from random selection. The null hypothesis does a lot of work here.

Second, I would observe that nearly all popular programming languages seem to be hybrids. Consider a different programming paradigm: Smalltalk-76 was purely "object-oriented" (everything is an object, every object has a class, every class has a superclass, objects communicate strictly by sending messages), but its most popular descendants seem to be hybrids. For example, C++, Java, and Python are not purely OO.

Therefore, we should expect that a popular functional programming language would also be a hybrid. And indeed when you view things in this light, many popular languages today have adopted bits and pieces that were once viewed as features of functional programming, such as automatic memory management, first-class lexical closures, and parametric polymorphism. Functional programming purists no doubt view this ad hoc borrowing as hopelessly inadequate cargo-cultism that misses the fundamental point of functional programming, but it is nevertheless exactly what we should expect from the gradual popularization of functional programming. In the essay Real Programming in Functional Languages (1982), J. H. Morris Jr. memorably wrote:

Functional languages as a minority doctrine in the field of programming languages bear a certain resemblance to socialism in its relation to conventional, capitalist economic doctrine. Their proponents are often brilliant intellectuals perceived to be radical and rather unrealistic by the mainstream, but little-by-little changes are made in conventional languages and economies to incorporate features of the radical proposals. Of course this never satisfies the radicals, but it represents progress of a sort.

I therefore claim that some small part of FP's "unpopularity" is apparent rather than real.

However, I admit that even the combination of the previous two explanations does not seem sufficient to explain why no primarily functional programming language has become the default way to program in a popular domain. But I don't think education is enough explanation either.

So I have to fall back on my primary theory: I maintain once again that languages reach popularity via platforms.

Thus, for example, Swift will probably be a big deal, independent of almost any qualities it has as a language. Apple is the dictator for the iOs platform. It seems likely that Apple will eventually make Swift the default way to program on iOs. Therefore, Swift will become popular, despite the fact that zero people graduating from university computer science programs in 2014 were taught Swift in school.

If functional programmers want FP to be a bigger deal, then my personal recommendation is:

develop an industrial-quality platform for doing something that large numbers of developers really want to do, and

evangelize the hell out of it, with a seriousness matching that of professional DevRel teams: videos, tutorials, books, portfolio-quality demo sites in GitHub, reliable turnkey commercial hosting infrastructure if need be, etc.

Web development is one good candidate domain, since (a) web development is a clusterfuck and thus ripe for improvement; (b) web developers are culturally eager to try the new hotness (in fact, arguably a little too eager); (c) you can reach a large audience without requiring any hard technology transitions of users since everyone has a web browser.

Look, for example, at how Rails lifted Ruby from relative obscurity to the default way (at least for a little while) that startups built websites in the Valley. The web framework space is more crowded today, but the field for new ones still seems fairly open, as long as you bring something new to the table. For example, focusing on realtime interaction seems to have bought Meteor a lot of buzz, despite the fact that its backend is currently built on a broken database.

Personally I think there is an opening for a "better PHP" — for all PHP's WTF/lol, if you study Keith Adams's talk "Taking PHP Seriously" (slides) it is clear that the PHP runtime does a few things right that no other platform currently does. Of course, at this point, you're probably laughing at the notion that a bunch of functional programming mandarins is going to successfully devise something for the median PHP programmer to pick up and use. But that is the type of work that might make functional programming the default way to do stuff.